Android Chrome Gets Desktop-Level User Experience

Hubert Nguyen and Eliane Fiolet

With a user base of 750M users, Google Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world. This is no small feat, and since we use a bunch of browsers, we have to say that Google deserves this success. But the work on Chrome is far from over, and given that its growth comes in a big part from mobile devices, Google has announced that Chrome for Android will get the same features and user experience as its desktop counterpart.

For example, Chrome for Android is going to support WebGL in a way that allows actual production apps (like webGL games) to be usable on the mobile web. While most of the mobile web usage still revolves around browsing pages, this gives the signal to developers that webGL applications may not be eligible for a code-once, deploy everywhere strategy — at least, that’s the theory.

Google also mentioned other interesting Chrome-related information: JavaScript (JS) performance continues to increase at a steady pace as JS compilers get better. Recently, Mozilla was able to compile C++ code into Javascript, and this could also spark the usage of existing C++ libraries in web-apps. We’ve seen a demo at GDC and it was pretty impressive.

In terms of video, VP9 is an open standard that can yield huge size and bandwidth savings over H.264 video compression standard. We’ll see how production tools support it, but in the intermediate term, this could be quite interesting both for users and producers alike.